Fox News senior political analyst Brit Hume told Hugh Hewitt Tuesday that the President Barack Obama and other Democrats’ partisan rhetoric is unprecedented.
“There’s no doubt about that, and you know, I’ve never seen, actually, partisan attacks, where you simply are attacking the other party outright by name, calling the other party out, is something a little unusual,” Hume said. “I’m accustomed to seeing, I mean, it’s done in one form or another, and it has been for years. But I’ve never seen it done by a president himself to the extent that it’s been done by this president. He does it regularly, it’s part of how he operates. For all the controversy that his presidency entailed, I never saw George W. Bush do that. I mean, there are ways to do it where you say things like, ‘Those who say this, and my opponents say that, or there are people in the other party who say this.’ But with Obama, this is a staple. This is how he rolls. This is what he does.”
Hume said there is no way of knowing if things will cool down so that an agreement on the current impasse can be reached. He added that the agreement will likely be unsatisfactory for both sides.
“I don’t know that anybody knows what the answer to that is,” he said. “I certainly don’t. I mean, I think it’s, I think this is as ugly as I’ve ever seen it, and I think it’s not going to end anytime soon. And I don’t see an early way out of this, unless, unless one thing happens. And the current impasse will end in some crude and unsatisfactory way, probably for all sides. But the question really is, when do we get to some moment where if things are settled, and the Republicans either succeed in their objectives of undoing Obamacare, and that happens, or the Democrats finally establish that this is how things are going to be and they win? But somebody, you know, we have divided government. The people have elected, you know, the people haven’t chosen one side or the other in this fight.”
Hewitt suggested that while this president has been very good scoring electoral victories, he has not been as successful in scoring political victories. But Hume questioned that idea, pointing to the 2010 midterm election in which the Democrats suffered heavy losses.
“But I would challenge your premise that he’s good at beating Republicans,” Hume said. “He’s good at winning elections, but you know, if he was so good at beating Republicans, he would have done a lot better in that midterm, wouldn’t he? And he didn’t. And that was, and you know, you hear the argument made by the president all the time that there was, that the other side in this Obamacare debate should shut up, because this is settled law, and there was an election held that affirmed it.”
“Well, the truth is that this election, this presidential election wasn’t very much about Obamacare, and the reason is that Mitt Romney, although he said over and over again that he was going to stop it in its tracks, it wasn’t the central issue in his campaign,” Hume continued. “His campaign was rooted in the idea that the economy was bad, that people would not ratify that, and that he was therefore, Romney, running downhill while President Obama was running uphill. And it turned out that President Obama might indeed have been running uphill, but he ran uphill all the way to re-election.”
